The Spring 2024 issue of Daedalus, Journal of the American Academy of Arts & Sciences, is devoted to the topic of higher education. A series of articles indicates that American leadership in higher education—as in other areas—is under great stress, particularly in its public universities, but also in its distinguished private universities, which have become lightning rods in current political and culture wars. In this nation, 43 of all 50 states have disinvested in higher education since 2008. Because public universities educate the majority of American students, these states have disinvested in their own future and the nation's future. The University of California, Berkeley, is the flagship of what has been the greatest system of public higher education in the world. California would not be the well-known state that it is without its signature network of public universities. Today, Berkeley is a bellwether for the future of American universities, nearly brought to its knees by a series of massive budget cuts, a poster child of the enduring unwillingness of the American public to support public higher education.
The “mission” of a sector of society can encompass a range of possibilities. Missions serve as guideposts that articulate a central purpose or goal, which should help to structure decisions and actions: who should be served, exactly what should be done, how the work is carried out, which measures can determine whether the mission actually is being realized, and, if not, how a course can and should be corrected. As expressed in one paper in Daedalus, the concept of mission becomes more vexed in the higher education sector.
Tertiary institutions all over the globe exist for a range of purposes, i.e., to provide professional training; teach and conduct research in an ever-expanding array of disciplines; educate underserved populations; focus explicitly on globalization, climate change, the arts, and cultivate specific political viewpoints and orientations. Many institutions have different stated missions. Extensive research focused on liberal arts and sciences at universities in the U.S. provides a troubling perspective. A disturbing lack of consensus exists among key individuals about the purpose(s) of higher education, both within single institutions and across the sector. Most notable, while students, parents, alumni, and trustees view a university primarily as the necessary path toward a future job, most faculty and administrators believe that the university experience is an opportunity for intellectual transformation, the time and place to prepare students for lifelong learning and citizenship.
Two reasons underlie this major misalignment. One explanation is mission sprawl, the promotion of multiple missions on a single campus. Rather than a set of focused goals, institutions attempt to pursue a myriad of goals for too many disparate groups in the population, thus obscuring their own primary reason(s) for existing. A second explanation involves universities that not only try to do too much, but also appear to be conflicted about what they are trying to do. Sometimes, single institutions promote explicit missions, clear and accessible statements of intent often found on their website and in their brochures, alongside implicit missions, underlying messages that all too often conflict with what is stated publicly.